Trans[verse]

This exhibition is an excursion [journey] into queer aesthetics of the techno era, depicting the contingency of pleasurable acts, requiring the cold realism of adulthood and city scenery, but also openness to meeting strangers and mingling with them. The visceral necessity of plugging into these precarious, volatile experiences is what makes this show one about everyone and no one in particular, a common platform we may share, regardless of the specificity of our own night life practices. The flashy, addictive rave digital experiences, dating apps and parties —all these experiences were built up as small, privatized utopias in the 1990s, and still guide us today.

Transversal and queer are not just the individuals depicted in the works we selected for this show, but also the strokes of the paint brush, flashes of our cameras and videos. The queer cruising utopia, as Esteban Muñoz had it, is made of these volatile touching and feeling, but also of the artistic strategies and techniques, revolutionizing and exploding the past regimes of representation. While Beatriz Preciado wrote about the playboy combos and taking testosteron shots, becoming Paul Preciado, who now demands space for the trans-speech, life and experiences, we all learned the vulnerability, but also a brutality, of our own affective and bodily exploits, the cruel optimism transforming our dream investments into nightmares, but also bringing about the guilty pleasures, growth and expansion. In the flashes of stroboscope lights, we experience mixed feelings and –most importantly– pleasures, sometimes intertwined with pain. In Trans[verse] the plethora of classic and new media makes us see the queer technoutopia unfolding, allowing the viewers and participants a mixed media, transversal experience.
Text: Ewa Majewska